In all these writings I have glorified the life of the soil until I am ashamed.  I have loved it because it saved me.  The farm for me, I decided long ago, is the only place where I can flow strongly and surely.  But to you, my friend, life may present a wholly different aspect, variant necessities.  Knowing what I have experienced in the city, I have sometimes wondered at the happy (even serene) faces I have seen in crowded streets.  There must be, I admit, those who can flow and be at one with that life, too.  And let them handle their money, and make shoes, and sew garments, and write in ledgers—­if that completes and contents them.  I have no quarrel with any one of them.  It is, after all, a big and various world, where men can be happy in many ways.

For every man is a magnet, highly and singularly sensitized.  Some draw to them fields and woods and hills, and are drawn in return; and some draw swift streets and the riches which are known to cities.  It is not of importance what we draw, but that we really draw.  And the greatest tragedy in life, as I see it, is that thousands of men and women never have the opportunity to draw with freedom; but they exist in weariness and labour, and are drawn upon like inanimate objects by those who live in unhappy idleness.  They do not farm:  they are farmed.  But that is a question foreign to present considerations.  We may be assured, if we draw freely, like the magnet of steel which gathers its iron filings about it in beautiful and symmetrical forms, that the things which we attract will also become symmetrical and harmonious with our lives.

Thus flowing with life, self-surrendering to life a man becomes indispensable to life, he is absolutely necessary to the conduct of this universe.  And it is the feeling of being necessary, of being desired, flowing into a man that produces the satisfaction of contentment.  Often and often I think to myself: 

These fields have need of me; my horse whinnies when he hears my step; my dog barks a welcome.  These, my neighbours, are glad of me.  The corn comes up fresh and green to my planting; my buckwheat bears richly.  I am indispensable in this place.  What is more satisfactory to the human heart than to be needed and to know we are needed?  One line in the Book of Chronicles, when I read it, flies up at me out of the printed page as though it were alive, conveying newly the age-old agony of a misplaced man.  After relating the short and evil history of Jehoram, King of Judah, the account ends—­with the appalling terseness which often crowns the dramatic climaxes of that matchless writing: 

“And (he) departed without being desired.”

Without being desired!  I have wondered if any man was ever cursed with a more terrible epitaph!

And so I planted my corn; and in the evening I felt the dumb weariness of physical toil.  Many times in older days I have known the wakeful nerve-weariness of cities.  This was not it.  It was the weariness which, after supper, seizes upon one’s limbs with half-aching numbness.  I sat down on my porch with a nameless content.  I looked off across the countryside.  I saw the evening shadows fall, and the moon come up.  And I wanted nothing I had not.  And finally sleep swept in resistless waves upon me and I stumbled up to bed—­and sank into dreamless slumber.